


Aftermath

by Inky_Pens



Category: Alex Stern - Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House - Leigh Bardugo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 13:08:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21179942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inky_Pens/pseuds/Inky_Pens
Summary: Alex reconciles the disappearance of Daniel Arlington from Rosenfeld Hall and Alex’s life





	Aftermath

Alex couldn’t distinguish the cold from the emptiness in the Rosenfeld basement. He was just there. He was looking at her, and he said—

She couldn’t remember. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember what Darlington had said to her only seconds ago.

The void in the corner was no longer there, and she shone her phone light in the empty space to find nothing out of the ordinary. There was a lingering warmth that was slowly dissipating, but portals must emit some kind of heat signature, so that made sense. She touched the walls, feeling for anything out of place. What was she, a fucking CSI? She had no idea what to look for, how to fix whatever this was. She would have to get someone from Scroll and Key to open whatever was here, but then that would mean they were using unsanctioned magic, so fat chance anyone would admit to that. She would have to tell Dean Sandow, but tell him what? She had nothing to go on here.

“Darlington?” Her voice was weak and thin, the tinkling of a thimble bouncing on the kitchen tile. There was a tremble in it, too, but that’s because _she_ was shaking, and violently. She should be running. Whatever just happened to Darlington could happen to her at any moment. But what did happen to him? It had to be a portal of some sort. She saw him sucked into something, or way it more like he way there one minute and gone the next? Her mind was muddling already. Then again, there was so much magical shit out there that maybe it wasn’t a portal at all. Maybe if she waited here, he would come back. Just pop right up, annoyed and ready to rain hell on the House that left their scraps of unauthorized magic behind. 

And then there was the whole business of what Darlington knew. What he thought he knew, she reminded herself. He pieced the gist of it together without exactly asking the hows or whys, only that he couldn’t keep it from Sandow. If she was here when he came back, then he’d see that she wasn’t running—_she should run_—and that had to count for something. He may have guessed a glimpse of who Alex was, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be someone different. She would just have to convince lawfully good Darlington that she needed Lethe and Yale, and that she had changed. She was not Galaxy Stern of Van Nuys, California anymore.

_Not Hellie_. It may as well have been a confession. She would just have to expand on the explanation. He would know better than anyone how unpredictable and jarring the uncanny could be. Once he understood, he could even feel sorry for her. Alex wasn’t above pity. You do what you need to do to get by, and swallowing pride is like swallowing anything else—a necessary evil. 

Without Darlington’s chattering, Rosenfeld Hall was silent and foreboding. It intimidated her to be in a place that could be haunted. She hadn’t seen Grays here, but she hadn’t noticed wards in place either. She itched to get out of here, but Darlington might appear just as quickly as he left. He could come back injured. Or this could all be a test to see how she follows protocols in situations like these. 

"Not very polite to haze the freshman, asshole!" she shouted to the empty walls. Her voice echoed back to her. She was utterly alone. 

Everything was happening all at once and before she could stop them, hot tears fell in rivulets over her cheeks, down her neck, into the collar of her sweater. It was her fault for opening her mouth to begin with, tipping him off like that because she’d become too clumsy with her secret. Too careless with the details. This was Darlington, gentleman and scholar of the utmost degree. He would have tried gleaming everything there was to know about her before he arrived on her doorstep as JEC, except there wasn’t anything to know about that night at Ground Zero, because the only person left to tell it was her.

An hour goes by, and there is no sign of him or the blackness that took him.

_Not Hellie_.

Darlington went to church. Did he pray? Should she?

She sat on the cold floor of the basement, rocking forward and staring at the corner. “Come on, come on, come on.”

They weren’t even supposed to be here tonight. It wasn’t a ritual night. It was one of the rare nights she had to study, and with her current academic standing, she desperately needed all the spare time she could get. He knew it, too, which is why he promised it would be a quick job. He’d asked her about her classes. He wanted her to succeed here. He cared. And what did she do when he needed her? _But what _could_ I have done to stop it?_

The last of her tears burned her eyes, and when she closed them, the last look he gave her flashed like a black and white portrait. Or a slow-motion movie from the ‘20s, each imperceptible change flicking through one frame after the other. The furrowed brow, then the wide eyes. At his final moments, he knew what was happening to him and he couldn’t tell her. There was unmistakable fear, followed by a look of warning. Or pleading. Both made her feel like shit. He was either trying to save her or asking to be saved. She only stood there, unmoving and frightened of everything to come and everything she was faced with. Face still frozen with the impasse they had silently acceded to. He probably thought she didn’t care. Worse if he though she left him to die. His last memory would be of the girl he thought he knew, the girl he only just scratched beneath the surface to find, the girl who stood before him in his last moments with impeccable resting bitch face. 

He’s not dead. It’s a portal. It’s just a fucking errant portal that stupid fucking Scrolls left behind for them to clean up because these rich kids walk on fucking water. He’s not dead. This is Darlington. Whatever happened he would come back from any moment now, or maybe the portal landed him in East Asia somewhere or Brazil, or Mexico, or France. Somewhere that he would know their language because this was Darlington, and he knew so many goddamn languages and she only really knew one and barely enough of the other, but he had been so surprised and impressed when she had cried out the words to her grandmother’s Ladino sayings. She just wanted him to come back and look at her that way again. The same way he looked at her at the Manuscript party. The way he looked when he made her breakfast the next morning and she told him to shut up about the thing that happened already and get the fuck over it. “You endured enough punishment blue balling it all night.” He’d cut her with the most annoyed glare, which only made her grin wider.

“Darlington!” This time she called out without reservation. Let them hear her. Let the Houses know she was not to be fucked with, Dante or not. Whatever would happen between her and Darlington she could figure out later, but as the minutes ticked by, dread uncoiled like the hidden snakes on her arms. She wasn’t happy he was gone. She wasn’t relieved he wouldn’t be running to Dean Sandow. She was scared. He would have protected her. Maybe not from expulsion from Lethe or Yale, but he would see to it that she was given fair treatment. He may even argue for her stay, to figure out this thing about her that separated her from everyone else. It’s possible he wouldn’t tell Sandow anything at all. There was so much he had left to teach her, and so much more she needed to learn so she never had to go back to what she was before Lethe came into her life. 

“Darlington! Get your ass back here! Darlington!” She leapt to her feet and grabbed rickety furniture and discarded memorabilia that strewn the basement walls. One by one, she threw everything she could against that wretched fucking corner. Chair legs smashed. Ugly ceramic containers and pots shattered. She took a floor-length lamp and beat it against the wall, watched as it twisted, bent, and broke in her hands. She pushed through the bone-chilling déjà vu and picked up the broken back of a chair. Smashed that against the wall, too. Everything Alex could put her hands on was destroyed in the corner of the basement in Rosenfeld Hall, and when she was finished, gulping lungsful of air, she remembered the floor of Il Bastone that she and him littered in fragments of thousand-dollar china and crystal. Whatever happened to Darlington, it was her fault. She felt it deeply, and she would carry it with her every moment of every day until they could get him back. 

The Grays were hovering on the street when she walked out of the house. She let them draw dangerously near, not seeing their eager expressions at what they hoped would be an encore performance of the meltdown that brought them here in the first place. With a rage that lived settled within her, she shouted, “Pasa punto, pasa mundo.”

_A moment passes, a world passes._ As the Grays skittered away, Alex briefly caught sight of them, hoping not to find a gentleman with a navy wool coat and betrayal in his eyes.


End file.
